New “Stuff” on BMD website

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Thomas,

Good question but I don’t know the answer and will have to try to contact one of the engineers at IBC to find out. They are on the stand at the show all day but hopefully I’ll be able to find out soon. I wonder what difference HDMI v1.2 and 1.3 would make to the person who asked the question? 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Sean Oneil]

Here’s a good article:
https://www.avrev.com/news/0706/06.hdmi13.shtml

Sean

[Thomas]

The person said that HDMI 1.2 can have a lot of color banding issues because it only uses 8 bit per channel color. I don’t see what the big deal is since the DSP in most HDV cameras is 8 bit anyways. I would take 8 bit per channel jpeg compressed HD over 8 bit per channel HDV anyday.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Thomas,

I’m still awaiting an answer on this but I can tell you that all of the cameras and other equipment we’ve tested was only outputting 8-bit color on their HDMI outputs. Capturing video as 8-bit uncompressed via HDMI is definitely going to help retain image and color quality compared with 8-bit DV or HDV captures via Firewire.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Thanks Sean,

That is a very interesting article. Thanks for posting the link.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Thomas]

One question about the new jpge codec. How much of the cpu does this use? I know photojpeg at HD resolutions can tax the system to the point where it would be really hard to edit multiple streams. Is the same true with this jpeg codec? Putting hard drive bandwidth aside is it possible to be to play multiple streams of the jpeg codec in realtime?

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Thomas,

It’s going to depend on the speed of your PC but if you have a very fast machine, I believe you could get a couple of streams of HD in real time using the Online JPEG codec. I guess we’ll get a much better idea when we release the new drivers and start seeing postings in this forum about what PC’s people are using and how many streams they can obtain. The engineers have mostly been concentrating on have a high quality, low bandwidth, codec and will need to do more testing before I can say anything definitive about the number of streams you can expect but 2 seems plausible.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Thomas]

Thanks for the info. I can’t wait to get this new card.

[Peter Gruden]

Whatever that means, HD Studio playing 1920×1080 jpeg video (6.3 mb/sec) on a very ordinary P4 2Ghz machine was loading the processor by only 15-20% on the BM stand at IBC.

Peter

[Thomas]

Wow where did they find a motherboard with a PCI Express X4 slot that can use that old of a P4 chip? At 2GHZ that would have to be a socket 478 chip unless you are talking about a newer core 2 dual such as Conroe. Those could be 2 GHZ but are actually some of the fastest systems out there right now.

That is a good sign about the cpu load however. This should make it very easy to handle at least 2 or 3 streams. 3 streams is pretty much my goal. That leaves A,B and an video track matte which is the most amount of layers I would ever use and want realtime. Anything above that I wouldn’t really care that much anymore.

Thanks for the info.